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Food security is the condition under which people have access to enough safe and nutritious food for a healthy and active lifestyle. More than 1 billion people work in agriculture to produce food on about 38% of the earth’s ice-free land. They produce more than enough food to meet the basic nutritional needs of every person on the earth. Despite this food surplus, one of every nine people in the world—about 815 million in all—is not getting enough to eat. These people face food insecurity by having to live with chronic hunger and poor nutrition that threaten their ability to lead healthy and active lifestyles. About 98% of the people facing food insecurity live in less developed countries, and 60% of them are women. In the United States, about 41 million people (13 million of them children under age 5) faced food insecurity in 2017.

Most agricultural experts agree that the root cause of food insecurity is poverty, which prevents poor people from growing or buying enough nutritious food to live healthy and active lives. This is not surprising given that in 2018, nearly 28% (2.1 billion) of the world’s people, struggled to live on the equivalent of $3.10 a day and 760 million people struggled to live on the equivalent of less than $1.90 a day, according to the World Bank and the Global Basic Income Foundation. Other obstacles to food security are war, corruption, bad weather (such as prolonged drought, flooding, and heat waves), climate change, and the harmful environmental effects of modern industrialized agriculture.

Each day, there are about 249,000 more people at the world’s dinner tables and many of them will have little or no food on their plates. By 2050, there will likely be at least 2.3 billion more people to feed. Most of these newcomers will be born in the major cities of less-developed countries. A critical question is how will we feed the projected 9.9 billion people in 2050 without causing serious harm to the environment? We explore possible answers to this question throughout this chapter.